Follow the Money 2012 Wiki
Follow the Money 2012: The Basics WHEN: Sunday, September 9th, from 12pm to 7pm WHERE: MIT Room 56-114 (The Whitaker Building) **location changed from 56-154 - we are now next door** RSVP: via followthemoney2012.eventbrite.com What's this event all about? Ever wondered about the influence between money and politics? Concerned about who's lobbying whom? Fed up with the lack of transparency in modern campaigns? What if you could help uncover data and develop tools to connect the dots between donors and candidates? To find out how you can make a difference, come join us on Sunday, September 9th, 2012 from noon 'til dinnertime, at MIT Room 56-154, where we'll be hosting an event that's part hackathon, part data dive, and all about exploring financial influence on politics. At this event, we'll take advantage of FEC disclosure requirements to determine political donations, with a particular focus on the U.S. Senate race here in Massachusetts between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown. Inspired by tools like the Sunlight Foundation's Influence Explorer, we'll blend FEC data with new web technologies to probe the relationship between money and politics and map the affiliations of political donors. It's your chance to follow the money and to create tools to help others do the same. Everyone is welcome, from political wonks to hard core hackers to folks with a little free time who just want to help make government more transparent and accountable. If you can't make it to MIT, contact us (via the eventbrite page) and we'll help you participate remotely. Or if you can't make it at all - watch this space! Because we hope to do more events like this one soon. The Nitty Gritty Our plan is to spend the day "answering questions". For instance: Who's given the most in the Massachusetts Senate race? How do contributions from an industry change before and after a big vote? Who are the country's biggest lobbyists and what relationships do they have with politicians and decision makers? What are the political beliefs and affiliations of our state - and our country's - biggest spenders? Some of those questions will be easy to answer. Others will require us to search out and download the relevant data, to analyze and graph it, and perhaps even to code some tools to make the job easier. Luckily, we'll have a host of talented people on hand - coders, writers, policy wonks, statisticians - who can work together to make this happen. At the beginning of the day - and even before hand, on this wiki - we'll brainstorm questions. Then we'll break up into teams of one or more to tackle those questions, using each other as resources along the way. We'll use this wiki to document the answers we find as well as the tools we make. Slightly confused? We'll be doing a test run of this structure on Friday, so check out this wiki the weekend of the event. Navigation #Questions #Resources #Answers Latest activity Category:Browse